Codebook Appendices | Spaeth & Agendas Comparison | Certs Denied Dataset

Supreme Court Dataset Codebook

Page Contents: Overview of Data | Coding Scheme | Organization

Download the data: Supreme Court Data (.xls)

Download the codebook: .doc | .pdf

Also see the five appendices that accompany this dataset: Coding Guidelines (A) | Citation Formats (B) | Court Procedures (C) | Glossary (D) | Resources (E)

Special Section: Cert Denied Cases and the Supreme Court

An Overview of the Data Set

The U.S. Supreme Court Data Set (1953-1998), created for the social scientist interested in the ways the U.S. Supreme Court effects public policy, tracks the policy agenda of the Court over time. If you are unfamiliar with Court procedures and/or terminology, we encourage you to refer to the outline and glossary of terms provided in appendices of this codebook before working with the dataset or for quick reference.

Background

To establish this dataset, we initially referenced “The Original U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Database” (nickname: ALL COURT) created by Harold J. Spaeth, currently the most comprehensive electronic U.S. Supreme Court data set available. Spaeth’s data set is intended primarily for legal (and policy scholars) researching the decision-making processes of the U.S. Supreme Court (i.e. determining what, when, and how cases are decided). Additionally, the data set includes all cases (granted or denied) where any justice is mentioned as having an opinion or dissent (regardless of whether or not the details of that opinion or dissent are published in U.S. Reports).

The Policy Agendas Project's U.S. Supreme Court data set was created with the intent of (1) assigning the Policy Agenda’s Project coding scheme to all cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and (2) answering agenda-setting questions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Policy scholars are interested in examining the policy implications of the legal choices made by the Court, and studying whether some policy areas are favored over others by being granted certiorari, while legal scholars could be more interested in the particulars of the legal reasoning underpinning cases..

For more information on these two Supreme Court datasets, read former Undergraduate Fellow Paul Bryce Counts' analysis on this issue.

The Dataset Worksheets

The following section will walk users through the four data worksheets currently available:

1. Certiorari.-Appeal Granted: This is the main worksheet and includes only cases granted on certiorari or on appeal and argued before the court regardless of whether or not a specific judge is mentioned as having an opinion. This are considered to be the most valuable in analyzing policy agenda setting trends. Note: Although most of the case citations from Spaeth were retrieved electronically via LexisNexis, we were unable to retrieve those cases that were granted on certiorari or on appeal, but were ruled with a per curiam decision (that is, an opinion from the Court having no specific justice mentioned as author). Because our primary focus is the policy agenda of the Court, we required ALL cases granted certiorari or on appeal and therefore had to refer to the hard copies of U.S. Reports to find these remaining cases. At this time, the dataset does not include all cases which were ruled with a per curium decision, only those which were included in the Spaeth dataset. Users are cautioned to consider this issue in their analyses.
   
2. Certiorari-Appeal Denied: This is the second data set that will ultimately be vital in adequately addressing the agenda setting questions. At this time, however, it remains incomplete. Included here are certioraris and appeals denied cases that where included in Spaeth’s dataset as a result of mentioning and/or detailing the opinion or dissent of a justice. For the purposes of future research, all certiorari and appeals denied cases (including those listed in this worksheet) are organized by date in the “Orders” section in the back of each volume of U.S. Reports. See the section titled “The Supreme Court and Certiorari Denied Cases” for a preliminary analysis of these and additional data.
   
3. Motions-Miscellaneous Orders Granted & Denied: All motions and miscellaneous orders (granted and denied) where an opinion or dissent by a particular judge is referred to in the Spaeth data set. We have excluded these orders from our main data set because these case types are inherently technical and/or legal in nature and therefore not relevant to policy analysis. Their inclusion would simply overpopulate the Law, Crime, and Family (1200) policy code category. However, if they are required, motion and miscellaneous orders denied cases (including those listed in this worksheet) are organized by date in the “Orders” section in the back of each volume of U.S. Reports and this data may be integrated into user analysis.
   
4. Multiple Hits: A search by case citation (e.g. 346 U.S. 0929) in LexisNexis that results in multiple cases being retrieved under that case citation indicates that multiple cases are listed on that page in the hard copy text of U.S Reports. This only occurs for case types where little information is provided such as motions, miscellaneous orders, certiorari denied or certiorari granted, but not yet argued. These are only included in the Spaeth dataset when at least one of the cases on a given page meet the requirements of referring to a justice’s opinion or dissent. Most of these cases are not relevant and are detailed only for reference.

Content Coding

We employed our standard 19 major topic and 220 minor topic codes used in the Policy Agendas Project to code all cases according to the policy content of each case’s summary as cited in U.S. Reports. However, we were careful to pay special attention to those policy areas unique to the Court (See Appendix A: U.S. Supreme Court Coding Guidelines for more information on this topic). The full description of content categories may be found in Topic Index on the Policy Agendas Project’s website.

Organization

1. Case Citation ("citation")
2. Case Name ("name")
3. Docket Number ("docket#")
4. Additional Docket Numbers ("docket x")
5. Summary
6. Topic/Subtopic Code ("code")
7. Ruling
8. Case Type ("type")
9. Vacated and Dismissed ("vac" and "dis")
10. Granted/Denied ("g/d")
11. Oral
12. Decision
13. Term A
14. Term B

1. Case Citation ("citation")

Multiple Hits: As previously explained, retrieving multiple hits under a given case citation indicates that these cases are listed in the "Orders" section at the back of a given volume of U.S. Reports. Although little information is provided, some of these cases are included in the Spaeth data set if the do in fact mention a justice as having given an opinion or dissent (regardless of whether or not the details were published). The dataset does not include these case types because, in general, they are irrelevant to policy analysis.

2. Case Name ("name")

3. Docket Number ("docket #")

Each case successfully filed with the Court assigned a docket number and that number placed in this column. See below when for how to handle additional docket numbers. The docket numbers consists of the year and consecutive case number (e.g. 97-3 is the third case filed in the 1997 term). In forma pauperis cases contain the year and begin with the number 5001 (e.g. 97-5003 is the third case filed in the 1997 term). Where no docket number is listed, a “0” is placed in the column as a placeholder.

4. Additional Docket Numbers ("docket x")

For example:

Here there are two docket numbers under one citation. As a result, ALL the information from the original entry has been copied to the line allowing us to maintain a running total of the number of case within each topic/sub-topic code.

Note: If no docket number is presented (for either the original docket number or for subsequent cases grouped under one ruling), a “0” is used as a place holder.

5. Summary

In some instances, little codable information is provided in this basic LexisNexis search, particularly for cases where certiorari was denied or cased decided per curiam. When this occurred, the following options were considered:

• Scroll down to the bottom of the case’s main information page and click on the “ Go to oral arguments in transcript” link and obtain further information here.

OR

• Look up lower court case (e.g. 198 F.2d 536). If the lower court case is not found on the main information page in LexisNexis, then search for the case in an online citatory, which tracks a case from beginning to end. Users may do this by performing the following steps:
• Click on the Shepards® link on the top right hand corner of the case description page

OR

• From LexisNexis Academic click the “Legal Research” link on the left side of the page.
• Click Shepards® for U.S. Supreme Court
• Type in the U.S. Supreme Court citation for the case you want to find, ensuring that the default “Shepards® for Research (FULL)” is selected
• From here, you will be provided with all lower court cases

OR

• Search for case by case name or case number in Google, www.law.com, www.findlaw.com, etc.

Note: Summary information for cert-denied cases is usually obtained by looking up the lower court decisions.

Unfortunately, coding solely on the basis of the content of each case summary provided in LexisNexis may not capture the intent of the justices for taking on a particular case. For example, a justice may elect to hear a case for the purpose of setting precedent in a given policy area (e.g. commerce), however the actual content of the case may reflect an entirely different policy area (e.g. civil rights). Because the factors involved in determining a justices’ intent for granting/denying certiorari, motions, etc. are far too numerous for our dataset to isolate if not explicitly stated in LexisNexis (See Appendix C: U.S. Supreme Court Procedures), we coded simply for the content/issue before the court (i.e. civil rights in this example), regardless of the court’s reasons for taking the case. Any further analysis as to “why” a given case is brought before the court (for the purpose of setting precedent or otherwise) is left to the researcher to determine.

6. Topic/Subtopic Code ("code")

Because the dataset examines agenda setting, cases were coded according to the issue brought before the court and not the issue ultimately decided upon. For example, a case brought before the court as a discrimination, but later ruled as a commerce case is coded as a discrimination. In this regard, adjustments to the coding scheme will need to be made for the purposes of analyzing decision-making policy trends of the court.
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7. Ruling

Additional information on current court rulings (and archives organized by topic, author, etc.) can be found at Legal Information Institute .

Special considerations:

• How this paragraph begins (e.g. “On certiorari…”, “On [direct] appeal…”, “ On certiorari case was vacated and remanded”, etc.) can be a helpful indication of how to identify the case type (See below)
• Additional useful information that may/may not be included in the description (e.g. habeas corpus, in forma pauperis, etc. as well as other case content) can sometimes be found in the “ruling.”

8. Case Type ("type")

• CERT = certiorari
• APPL = appeal
• MOT = motion (ONLY those where an a justice is mentioned as having an opinion)
• MISC = misc. orders (exclusively for stays, habeas corpus, decrees, etc. and ONLY those where a justice is mention as having an opinion)

See Types of Cases before the Court in Appendix C: U.S. Supreme Court Procedures

9. Vacated and Dismissed ("vac" and "dis")

10. Granted/Denied ("g/d")

11. Oral

12. Decision

13. Term A

14. Term B

Written by:

Michelle Huynh, fmr. Undergraduate Fellow, CAPP
Kyle Sommer, fmr. Undergraduate Fellow, CAPP